Hi, could someone please add the Christ is Risen tag and maybe a picture to this main page!! [[User:Ixthis888|Vasiliki]] 23:07, April 28, 2008 (UTC)

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A suggestion about the saints of the day

I know that a majority of the Orthodox in America are on the New Calendar, but since a majority of the Orthodox in the world are on the Old, would it be possible to list the saints of the day according to each calendar... somewhat along the lines of what is done on the main page of Orthodoxinfo.com?

-Fr. John Whiteford 3-22-07 (3-09-07 o.s.) :)

There are two possibilities for this that I can think of:

Edit all 366 calendar day templates to include a separate section for the OC day. (This will require some rearranging of the main page design to account for the extra text.)

Figure out some way to code the wiki to display a separate section which automatically figures -13 days. At the moment, the daily feasts section is possible because the wiki "knows" what day it is today. (This will also require redesign for the main page.)

Of these two, I don't know how to do the latter, but it would require much less work.

The difficulty with the former, aside from being a large amount of work, would be that it would make all the many thousands of internal links to dates confused: to which date should they link? Both? The calendar local to the saint when he died? Either way, this would require a level of work I don't even want to begin to imagine.

I'm hoping perhaps FrJohn knows of some module or something he can plug in or write to teach the wiki how to figure out what day it was 13 days ago. It seems like a relatively simple thing for a computer to figure. The first solution seems almost insurmountable to me.

In any event, since we invented the "Today's feasts" section, I've wished we could display the OC feasts, as well. —Fr. Andrewtalkcontribs 05:13, March 22, 2007 (PDT)

For what it’s worth, here’s my thoughts. In the first option, Edit all 366 calendar day templates, each template could just include the template of 13 days earlier. The problem is that on leap years, the first half of March will need to be altered and altered back afterwards. (The page could just display a link to the other day instead of displaying the text).

The second option, using math, is better, but calculations do not seem to work here. But if it did, not only could OC dates be calculated, but moving feast days could be calculated too. - Andrew 06:41, March 22, 2007 (PDT)

It looks like there are some templates at meta wiki for Julian dates, and it might be useful to look into importing them. However, due to the large amount of information, I'm not sure what we'd need. —magda (talk) 09:18, March 22, 2007 (PDT)

Editing templates to include the template from 13 days earlier wouldn't work, as it would become multi-referential and end up including all 366 days every time. In addition, in leap years, the alignment is different around Feb. 29. —Fr. Andrewtalkcontribs 14:25, March 22, 2007 (PDT)

I am not enough of a computer nerd to know how workable this would be, but if there was a way to just subtract 13 days from any given date that factored in what year it was, you would have the correct Julian date through the rest of this century, because every year that is a leap year, is a leap year on both calendars.

-Fr. John Whiteford

The only way that would work is if it were automatically done. I was responding to the suggesting of hard-coding in nested templates; this would only work if years all had exactly the same number of days, since -13 for March 1, for instance, will be different from one year to the next. I think the only way this will work is if we can somehow get the wiki to calculate -13 based on {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTDAY}}, which generates the appropriate date. —Fr. Andrewtalkcontribs 18:52, March 22, 2007 (PDT)

I could put you in touch with Patrick Barnes. I'm not sure how he does it, but it works.

-Fr. John Whiteford

I can't imagine that that would be compatible with the wiki software. —Fr. Andrewtalkcontribs 17:28, March 22, 2007 (PDT)

Scientific Julian Date vs. Julian Calendar

It is not clear from the templates, but the Julian Date is a scientific way of calculating time that only has a tangential connection with the Julian Calendar... so you would just want to make sure you were getting the right Julian Date.

-Fr. John Whiteford

Hi Fr. John, Thanks for your comment. I'm not sure I know what you mean - is this issue clarified on the Julian Calendar page? — FrJohn (talk)

A new suggestion about the Saints of the Day

I am not sure how the main page is set up, but for each day you have a template, and a page for the day. On the page for each day you could easily have it point to the Template for both the old and new calendars. There are only 13 days each 4 years that this would be a problem for, and that is March 1-13. You could deal with that by just setting up those days the way that they will be in a non-leap year year, and maybe put a note regarding the one day variance when a leap year occurs. You could put two templates for the Old calendar on these days, with the second template prefaced by a note that these are the Old Calendar commemorations when it is a leap year. You could modify the day pages for these dates every leap year, and then change them back afterwards.

Then the main page could draw from the text of the day page rather than the templates. What think ye all? Frjohnwhiteford 10:13, April 19, 2007 (PDT)

This syntax won't work for the main page, because the main page's feasts are based on an automatic variable that "knows" what day it is and includes the proper template accordingly. If you know how to make the wiki calculate -13 from the date it "knows," then we're in business.

Having the main page include April 19 (that is, as a new template, not as April 19), however, would mean having to create a whole series of nested templates, involving changing every single link to a date in the whole wiki (many thousands of links).

But that then introduces confusion for folks who click on April 19 and see two sets of feasts, one labeled as "Old" and one as "New." This would be a problem, for instance, in the Annunciation article. You click on March 25 and see that the "New" feasts include Annunciation, but the "Old" do not. Does that mean that Old Calendarists aren't celebrating the Annunciation on March 25? In fact, they are celebrating it on March 25, but by another calendar. I can think of no way of solving that problem.

I really think we need to find some sort of extension for the wiki so that it can "know" what day it was 13 days ago. —Fr. Andrewtalkcontribs 13:45, April 19, 2007 (PDT)

I agree that your fix would be the ultimate fix, but short of that, is it possible to put templates inside of templates? If so, you could have a template for Apirl 19 which is formated such that it has two subtemplates: one with the menologion for April 19th, and another that would be preceeded by a lable such as April 6th, O.S. (or something like that) with a template for the April 6th Menologion.

To make this happen, we would need to rename the calendar templates as we now have them, and then creat new templates for each day that would point to two of those renamed templates for each day. If you think it would work, I would be happy to do the actual foot work on it, once we had an agreed upon format. Frjohnwhiteford 18:41, April 19, 2007 (PDT)

Yes, templates can be nested. I do think that it would work, but it doesn't solve the problem I outlined in my last paragraph above. When you click on the non-template date article, you see two sets of dates, one "new" and the other "old." But which one did the link you followed reference?

I also think the 13 problem days during a leap year would make for some serious design imbalance and ugliness on the Main Page. (Of course, having two sets of feasts will likely require some redesigning, anyway.)

I'm hoping that FrJohn might be willing to look into the idea of automating this before we do a massive amount of hard-coding for it, because I definitely agree that we should be able to put the OS feasts on the Main Page, too. —Fr. Andrewtalkcontribs 19:28, April 19, 2007 (PDT)

Addendum: Okay, I've learned that I was wrong about including articles that are in the main namespace (i.e., anything that doesn't have a "Something:" in front of it). You can include a main namespace article by this syntax: {{:ArticleName}}.

If we have to do the hard-coding solution, it might end up being possible not to have to nest templates, after all. We would, however, have to reformat the calendar day articles (e.g., April 19) with various instances of <includeonly> and <noinclude> tags. (I could probably make my bot do that.)

Perhaps, for instance, the OS feasts could be put inside <includeonly> tags. That way, the only way you'd see them is when the date article is transcluded onto the Main Page. Then, all the apparatus we'd like to appear when one clicks on the day (e.g., categories, headers, etc.) would be put inside <noinclude> tags so that it wouldn't appear on the Main Page. (This solves my "Which kind of date did I click from?" problem, BTW, since you'd only see one set of dates.) —Fr. Andrewtalkcontribs 19:50, April 19, 2007 (PDT)